Efficiency Enhancement of ECGA Through Population Size Management

This paper describes and analyzes population size management, which can be used to enhance the efficiency of the extended compact genetic algorithm (ECGA). The ECGA is a selectorecombinative algorithm that requires an adequate sampling to generate a high-quality model of the problem. Population size management decreases the overall running time of the optimization process by splitting the algorithm into two phases: first, it builds a high-quality model of the problem using a large population; second, it generates a smaller population, sampled using the high-quality model, and performs the remaining of the optimization with a reduced population size. The paper shows that for decomposable optimization problems, population size management leads to a significant optimization speedup that decreases the number of evaluations for convergence in ECGA by a factor of 30% to 70% keeping the same accuracy and reliability. Furthermore, the ECGA using PSM presents the same scalability model as the ECGA.